Sheridan Women at The Lady Hacks

The Lady Hacks is a student-run, women-only hackathon for female students from a variety of disciplines. Taking place at York U, The Lady Hacks provides a safe and supportive environment to participate in collaborative, web-based solution development over a 32-hour period. An inclusive and safe environment, female students from all backgrounds and experience levels enjoyed an accessible, approachable, positive place to explore their technical abilities, meet other women and exercise their imagination to create interesting and innovative hacks.

Team 'Win-Win' included Laura Martinez Guillen from Sheridan's Systems Analyst program, Lizzie Urrutia from Sheridan's Systems Development Network Engineering program who was also selected to attend Passport to Google in Waterloo, Yeji (Alex) Park from Sheridan's Systems Development Network Engineering program as well as two York University Business students, Simran Mahajan and Sixin Zhang.

This group of five developed the Win-Win web app designed to provide a member-based services exchange platform, inspired by the needs of the community and connection where 'paying it forward' can be used as a form of currency. Win-Win connects local members that can provide skills or services as a form of currency. The app lets users exchange their skills and services, earning or spending points, in real time. With this app people who need help can get it promptly and in return, can provide help based on their skills and capabilities.

Win-Win was built using AngularJS framework, NodeJS and Material design, with GitHub as the source code management system to foster collaboration, and is hosted on Azure Cloud Server. Win-Win was awarded the 'Best Use of Microsoft Azure Cloud Services” prize, one of the industry/sponsor-selected prizes after presenting a live demo of their hard work and creative solution. Click here to learn more about the Win-Win solution.

Another team with strong Sheridan representation had a great showing at The Lady Hacks. Team 'Personal Assistant Chat Bot' made up of Sheridan's Shirin Mizan, Software Development & Network Engineering student graduating in December, Sheridan's Samantha Tu, 3rd year Interaction Design program and three U of T Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science students, Abha Hameed, Maria Duong and Jennice Colaco joined in developing their Personal Assistant chat bot called Super Alexa.

Super Alexa seamlessly integrates daily reminders and specific tasks into one’s life, with the familiarization of one’s own voice or that of a loved one. The Super Alexa solution used technologies including linking Alexa to Google Calendar, and an IFTTT recipe to automatically add the event to Calendar. Checker Plus for gmail and Mixmax were add-ons for text-to-speech functionality and to automate email submission. GoogleScripts extracted calendar information and sent an email with only the text needed, through the mechanism of speech-to-text then text-to-speech. Amazon Echo microphone was used to talk to Alexa.

This type of hackathon not only inspires thought, creativity and imagination in a supportive environment, it encourages interdisciplinary networking within academics and fosters opportunity for connecting with industry. Alyssa Citrigno, Campus Recruiting for RBC, was onsite and involved with several of the teams.

Shirin Mizan said it was really worth it to join this event, and offered up thanks to Fran Burke from Sheridan's Coop office for circulating details about The Lady Hacks hackathon.

Way to go team Sheridan women! We're proud of your hard work and success.